sharing my PC videos to my TV
#1
I am a novice with this. Here's what I have: I have a PC running Ubuntu Linux with XBMC Frodo installed. (You know, the panels I see in MY installation really don't look like the examples on the XBMC web site, but still it is installed and starts and plays videos.) All network-enabled devices in my house are wireless. When I went to the network setup in XBMC I enabled UPnP (don't really know what that is) and when I did that my PC suddenly showed up on my TV as an input source. I didn't know it could do that, so I wanted to try to play videos on the TV that are stored on my PC. So I selected that as my input on my TV and it shows TWO folders: Audio and Videos. Where does it get these folders from? I choose Audio and it shows about 10 more folders with various names such as "Years", "Genres", etc., but all of these folders are empty. Where does it get these folders from? When I choose the Videos folder it is empty. I have tried to set up libraries on my XBMC on my PC. Now these videos are not movies that have metadata; they are home videos. All they have to identify them is their path and file name. I add the source and the files are there and they play in the XBMC player. But they don't show up on my TV. So I tried the idea of playing one of these videos in my XBMC player and seeing if it would show up on my TV. It does not.


My TV is an LG 47" Class Cinema 3D 1080p 240Hz Full LED TV with SmartTV (46.9" diagonal), model # 47LM8600. As one of it's apps it has something called Smartshare, and something called SIMPLINK. It says to use SIMPLINK I need to have PLEX installed on my source server.

OK, here is one other thing: my TV says it has these connectivities:

Wi-Fi Ready / Built-in • (Built-in)
MHL •
2nd TV Ready •
WiFi Direct •
Media Link •
DLNA (Movie/Photo/Music) • (What is DLNA and how to use it?)
Windows 7 Certified •
Intel® Wireless Display (WiDi) •
SIMPLINK (HDMI CEC) •




OK, so there's my question. How can I watch my videos on my TV (or any other device in the house for that matter)?
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#2
XBMC is primarily designed to be on a computer that is plugged into your TV via HDMI (or DVI or VGA or component etc).

Upnp/DLNA server is built in, but it is of limited functionality given that it doesn't transcode, and many upnp/dlna playback devices (ie your TV) only play back limited codecs and formats of file.

Also the UI on most TVs is nowhere near as nice as XBMC, slow and clunky, fast forward/rewind/skip work badly, subtitle support is limited etc.

Plug an HTPC into your TV, you won't be sorry, and it will be far smarter than your smart TV, believe me I have one too.
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#3
I would like to know what panels dont look like the exaples on the website, most likely you haven't setup your XBMC the same way.
But ya whatever you see on your TV via uPnP is nothing like XBMC in any case and probably most formats will fail to play.

DLNA is used automatically when using uPnP provided the connected equipment server/client are DLNA certified. What DLNA is well ask google Im not going to parrot perfectly good info.

As for your other question How do you play your videos in any device....see File sharing (wiki) You get a server and use something like SMB to share that content to other network machines with or without XBMC.
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